Booked is not collected until it is

Every tool that touches a sales pipeline is tempted to count the same dollar twice. A quote is sent, so it is "in the pipeline". It is accepted, so it is "won". The job is scheduled, so it is "booked revenue". By the time the customer cancels the week before, the number has been on three dashboards. We decided early that Max would not do this.

Two numbers

When Max books a job off a quiet quote, the value goes into a figure called recovered, booked. Nothing else moves. When the invoice for that job is paid, the same value goes into recovered, collected. The two are never added together, and the second one is the one we show first.

The nightly reconciliation

Every night Max reads the invoices back from the business's own software and matches them to the jobs he booked. A paid invoice moves a job from booked to collected. A cancelled job leaves the booked figure. The business's books are the source of truth, not ours, which is also why there is nothing to argue about at the end of the month.

Why it matters

Because the only honest way to price a product that recovers money is against money that arrived. A number you can check against your own bank deposits is the only one worth putting on a front page, and it is the only one we will use in a case study.